Asokan Pichai wrote: > IMO the regex is not too bad; I will not use it for this job -- typing > a 50+ character string > is more painful (and more error prone) than writing 5--10 lines of code. Well, you can build the string programmatically: >>> "*".join(string.ascii_lowercase) + "*" 'a*b*c*d*e*f*g*h*i*j*k*l*m*n*o*p*q*r*s*t*u*v*w*x*y*z*'